BUENOS AIRES — For fans of Argentina’s national soccer team, the enduring images of recent tournaments are painful. Lionel Messi staring impotently at the World Cup trophy on his way to collecting a second-place medal in 2014. Gonzalo Higuaín sending a penalty kick skyward as Chile won last year’s Copa América final. Roberto Ayala turning a cross into his own net in yet another lost Copa final in 2007.

Despite the undisputed quality of its roster and its recurring role as a favorite, Argentina heads into its opening match of the Copa América Centenario on Monday cloaked in doubt. The uncertainty is stoked by all those recent near misses; by a perennial tug of war over the national team’s style of play; and by the long-running debate about how to get the best out of Messi.

“Teams can start to believe their curse,” said Jonathan Wilson, a British writer, most recently of a coming book about Argentina’s soccer history.

If Argentina stumbles again at the Copa — a centenary version of South America’s premier soccer tournament being hosted outside the continent for the first time — the fear is that a generation of offensive talent that includes Messi, who will turn 29 two days before the Copa final, but also Higuaín, Ángel Di María, Sergio Agüero, Javier Pastore and Carlos Tévez may have been wasted.

“There is no option but to win it,” Javier Mascherano, a midfielder, said shortly before the team flew from Argentina to its base in San Jose, Calif.

For some observers, the sense of urgency is intensified by the diminished quality of Argentina’s new batch of players.

Since its triumph at the 1993 Copa América, Argentina has not won another major tournament, losing six finals along the way. Its last World Cup championship was 30 years ago this summer, when a Diego Maradona-led Albiceleste lifted the trophy in Mexico.

Back then, the coach was Carlos Bilardo, a former physician whose laborious and structured approach prioritized results, not the process that led to them.

“Soccer is played to win,” Bilardo is quoted as saying in Wilson’s book. “Shows are for the theater.”

The goals of a lifetimeCreditVideo by FIFATV

In 1978, however, the only other time Argentina won the World Cup, the coach was César Luis Menotti. Menotti was Bilardo’s antithesis, a thinker and idealist who believed there was intrinsic value in aesthetics. He prized possession, nurtured artistry in offense and encouraged players to improvise.

“The essence of Argentine soccer is freedom,” Alberto Tarantini, a defender on the 1978 team, said in an interview. “If you fill players’ heads with tactical systems, you inhibit them.”

1978 WORLD CUP FINAL: Argentina 3-1 NetherlandsCreditVideo by FIFATV

While intellectual struggles between pragmatism and purity have driven soccer narratives in many corners of the world, it is in Argentina, perhaps, that the dichotomy most shapes the battle for the soul of the game.

The schism is often traced to Argentina’s disastrous exit from the 1958 World Cup, which was long before Menotti and Bilardo entered the picture. And today, although a new generation of Argentine coaches has been emerging with broader influences, the debate remains fierce.

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Argentina’s Roberto Ayala lay on the ground after scoring an own goal against Brazil in the 2007 Copa America final.CreditAlejandro Pagni/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Argentine soccer is very rich in this discussion of ‘How should we win?’ ” said Ezequiel Fernández Moores, a prominent Argentine soccer columnist, who noted that feuding was prone to escalate around tournaments involving the national team.

Underscoring how Argentina has recently produced both a preternatural offensive talent like Messi and a coach like Atlético Madrid’s Diego Simeone, whose teams are celebrated for their defensive grit, Fernández Moores said, “The dispute will be eternal.”

Even as the two ideologies have slowly converged, Gerardo Martino, Argentina’s current coach, who guided the team to the Copa América final a year ago in Chile, has not escaped clashes over the nation’s soccer identity.

Pointing to the continuing tensions, Higuaín was asked at a recent news conference here whether it was more important for Martino to end Argentina’s trophy drought or to win over fans to his preferred playing style.

Martino adheres loosely to the philosophy of Marcelo Bielsa, a pioneering former coach of the national team with a cult following. Bielsa forged a middle path between Menotti and Bilardo, though his quixotic obsession with possession and offense did not translate into the kind of international success Argentina still craves.

“I’d like the team to stand out for the way it plays,” Martino told Diario Popular, an Argentine newspaper, last year, “but also because of the final result.”

While Argentina briefly dazzled at the 2015 Copa América, beating Paraguay, 6-1, in its semifinal, it was more muted in the final. Facing a Chile team that embraced Bielsa’s doctrine under its own Argentine coach, Jorge Sampaoli, Martino’s side played cautiously and lost. To many observers, Argentina’s performance mirrored those at the 2014 World Cup directed by Alejandro Sabella, a coach dismissed by some fans who considered him too negative.

With this friction as a backdrop, the great conundrum confronting Martino remains how to make Messi sparkle. Voted the world’s best player in five of the past seven years because of his thrilling performances at Barcelona, where he scored 37 goals last season, Messi has shown only fleeting brilliance in the blue and white stripes of his Argentina jersey.

There is added pressure on Messi in this month’s Copa América since, for many fans, his place alongside Maradona as one of the sport’s (and his country’s) greatest players depends on his lifting a major trophy with the national team. Expectations for him at the tournament are predictably lofty.

“If the game is in stalemate, we need to be able to give the ball to Messi for him to win it,” Martino said in a recent interview with the newspaper La Nación.

But there have been concerns about Messi as the tournament approached. He flew from Spain to Argentina to play in a friendly on May 27 — in which he was substituted after a bruising blow to his back — and then swiftly returned to testify in a tax-evasion trial. He rejoined his teammates during the weekend, although the back injury looks set to sideline him from the first game against Chile on Monday night at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.

Martino has other problems, too. Messi aside, several key players are fighting to overcome injuries before the Chile match. And — not for the first time — at home, the Argentine soccer federation is mired in a dispute with the government that briefly jeopardized the national team’s participation in the Copa.

Inevitably, too, debate is already accelerating about what it would mean for Argentine soccer and Martino if the team failed to triumph, or won with insufficient flair.

“Whatever happens,” Pablo Lucero, 22, a soccer player for a minor league team here, said, “we always complain.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Argentina Struggles to Prevail, Preferably in Proper Style. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe